Best online casinos for your country to play Blackjack | reviewed and ranked in May 2024
Have you been running around different online blackjack sites, wondering where you should even start? Do you love blackjack, love gaming online, but feel out of your depth when you go to a real money online casino? Would you like some help to sort all of this out and clear things up so you can go forward and have some fun? We have written this guide with you specifically in mind. We hope that by the time you finish this article, you will be full of confidence to go out there and enjoy yourself playing some blackjack online, having fully understood the basics of this classic card game.
Basic Principles Of Blackjack
Blackjack is a game where players play against the dealer. Many people feel that with a live dealer blackjack is a better game, which is why this option is becoming so common in online casinos these days. The best blackjack sites go out out of their way to find good dealers to keep the action pumping 24/7 online. The rules of blackjack are probably already known very well by anybody already visiting this site. To sum blackjack strategy and tactics up, it’s about knowing when to hit and when to stand. There are, of course, many subtleties, some of which we will look at over the course of this article.
Is Online Blackjack Different?
Someone once said that the main difference between the top online blackjack casinos and their brick and mortar counterparts is the dress code! All jokes aside, there are two main differences between playing blackjack online. The first one is that the speed at which you can play the game is much less limited in an online setting. If you want, you can set up games where you play the dealer five times at once, for example. The second main difference is the bonuses. These should never be overlooked. A brick and mortar casino has an incredibly high overhead and as such, can’t afford the generous bonuses online casinos routinely put out there.
Different Types Of Blackjack
Besides the classic blackjack everybody knows and loves to play, at a blackjack online casino, there are many interesting and eminently playable variations of the game. The chief one of these is European Blackjack, where the dealer’s “hole” (face down) card is the second card instead of the first. Other popular variations of blackjack include Atlantic City Blackjack, Blackjack Switch, Spanish Blackjack, Pontoon, Vegas Strip Blackjack, and Super Fun 21. Many of these variations are very subtle. Many of them also have a set number of decks used for the game, at least in any kind of casino setting. European Blackjack is considered to be the best variation by many.
Which Style of Blackjack Is Right for You?
If you’re just in it for the fun, then the answer boils down to personal preference. There is no real concrete answer to which style of blackjack is right for you. You can just pick whichever set of rules suits you the best. If you are one of those power gamers who is always looking for the best edge possible against the odds, most of the time the biggest factor in your mind needs to be the number of decks used. This affects your ability to count cards and randomizes the game. Another major factor to watch is definitely the payouts; these can be a lot more important than people think at first.
Blackjack Strategies
There is one strategy that’s pretty much 100% foolproof, and that is to never take any type of “insurance” in a blackjack type game ever. All one does, in that case, is give the house an excuse to better their odds even more. Avoid that at all costs. For one and two deck versions of blackjack, using your memory becomes important. This is especially true in games where there is a lot of splitting going on, for obvious reasons. Drill yourself on this. Also, surrendering in blackjack can be a powerful way of maximizing your odds. It’s a good idea to look at tables and memorize them and especially to understand the logic behind them.
Blackjack Tactics
Having said everything we just said, we don’t think that sticking to tables is necessarily the best strategy. Once again, if you’ve been counting cards, this can work to your advantage. If you’ve been successfully counting cards in a low-deck game and see an opportunity that goes against general strategy, don’t hesitate to take it. If the forecast called for sun and it started raining out of the blue, you would, of course, reach for your umbrella, wouldn’t you? The same principle applies here. Success in blackjack has a lot to do with living in the moment and not being rigid but rather flexible and observant of the current situation.
Blackjack General Tips
Besides the above-mentioned advice to be flexible, moderation is very important in blackjack. If you lose your head, you could wind up making very bad decisions at the table, so keep as cool as a cucumber at all times. Corollary to this idea, you want to be prepared to walk away from a hand at any time. Since your hand is always going to be pitted against that of the dealer, you have to keep in mind that the value of any given hand at any given time is very relative. That is to say, 21 is a great hand unless the dealer gets a blackjack, in which case you lose!
How Blackjack Odds Work
One of the things that people like about blackjack over other casino games is that blackjack has a big element of skill to it. We like to feel like our performance makes a difference at the table, and that we had some agency in getting those wins. The long and the short of it is that the house, of course, is always going to have an edge. But we can reduce that edge to next to nothing with good in-game decisions. The odds in blackjack range from around 8% against the ignorant player to 0.2% for the most astute player. In other words, if you know what you are doing, you can get better odds than almost any other game.
Why Blackjack, Compared to Other Games?
Let’s continue to elaborate on that point. On average, the house has roughly a 0.5% edge against you in online casinos, and somewhere around 1% usually in the average brick and mortar casino. Blackjack allows you to either make the odds way worse or quite a bit better than that, depending on your level of skill. If you make the investment in learning the game properly, that gives you an edge over the run of the mill casino-goer who doesn’t. It’s also generally true that you can do the same thing with poker. The difference between poker and blackjack is that the learning curve is orders of magnitude higher in poker.
In Conclusion
If you’ve made it here, we’d like to thank you very much for taking the time to read our guide to the fascinating world that is blackjack. We hope that now you are ready to take those online casinos on in the biggest way. We wrote this article because we have a special passion for blackjack, and we hope it shows! We also hope that this passion is contagious and that we have created a new fan of blackjack by having you read it. We’d like to leave you with a list of what we think are the top blackjack sites to get you started and on your way to a world of blackjack-related enjoyment!